I live in Jersey, the home of the Jersey cow! I know the milk is very high in fat and I'm trying to find out what I need to do with it. I know someone involved in the dairy so I'm hoping to be able to get hold of raw milk.

From what I have read on here, it should be good for soft and semi soft cheeses. Is this correct? I'm hoping to start off with these. Does that mean I can just use the milk as instructed in recipes?

For some harder cheeses, it seems that I want to skim off the cream? Is this worth the effort or would I be better off using a different milk?

Hi Sam. If you have access to good fresh raw Jersey milk, IMHO you can use it in pretty much every kind of cheese from soft to hard. The only place that I might consider skimming the lovely cream would be if I was making an Emmental, Parmigiano, or other low-fat style.

If you use raw milk, the caution is to ensure it comes from a reputable dairyman. If you have doubts, you can still pasteurize it.

I've found that using whole milk from our Jerseys is too much fat for Cheddar types. Comes out too soft. But there can be big variation between fat (and protein) levels between cows, based on genetics and management styles. We don't "push" our cows to production as much as a more commercial farm would, so they are apt to produce less but more concentrated milk. Works wonderfully for soft, fresh, bloomy, and washed-rind cheeses though. So for hard cheeses, what I tend to do is just top-skim some of the cream from about half the milk (have left it chilling in a pot in the fridge overnight, with some cream rising), tends to work out better for hard cheeses for me.

I guess the best idea is to try making some cheese and know what to look for in the final result that indicates too much fat.

I'm hoping the milk supply will be fairly stable as it is the main (and only) dairy for the island of 100,000 people. I could get hold of pasteurized instead but from what I have seen so far, if I am confident in the raw milk quality, I should go with that.

Welcome to the CheeseForum! I have one cow that is 3/4 Jersey and 1/4 Holstein. Her milk is very creamy and, like said above, I do skim some of the cream off for cheeses that should be dryer, including cheddar and parmesan. With just one, though, the amount and quality of the cream changes throughout the year and her lactation, so I take it on a day to day basis, more or less.

Start with the simpler, soft cheeses meant for fresh eating and work on one or two similar ones until you feel that you have gotten it "right". Then choose another cheese and keep working on that type until you understand the make. There are so many different kinds of cheese that it is easy to get distracted and want to try making them all, but you will learn a lot more if you start out slow and steady. Once you've made a few different types of hard, aged cheese, you can let yourself go and probably won't make as many "mistakes"...

Have great fun with this!

Oh, and if you do skim the cream, you can use that to make mascarpone...and from mascarpone, heavenly tiramisu! Here's the link to a thread with the recipe I use, in the first reply to the OP.

I milk Jersey cows and make a blue cheese (90 days), a clothbound cheddar (6 months - 1 year), and Alpine cheese modeled after Gruyere and a washed rind cheese similar Taleggio. The milk works wonderfully for all, though the most challenging, by far, is the blue cheese. This is due in part to the large fat globules of the Jersey milk and the fact that the curd body wants to knit and close all air pockets. Still, it can be done but the aging space is very important for the blues.